Dickinson and Stein

With this week’s readings, you can really see the progression of poetry from the times of Shakespeare to that of Dickinson and Stein. With Dickinson, this idea of structured rhythm and rhyme is still apparent. She definitely has a specific scheme with her end rhymes, and the meter of her poems is very clean, similar to that of the sonnet. However, Dickinson hasn’t stuck to the typical ABAB iambic pentameter format for her poems. The language in her poetry is obviously not exactly equivalent to today’s English. However, her language and word choice is significantly more modernized than the Old English of Shakespeare.
Stein takes a completely different approach to her poems. Being structured as a paragraph, you get the feel of poetic prose when reading her work. She takes this idea of free verse and runs with it. The ambiance, along with the aesthetics of the poetry, is also very different than that of a Shakespearian sonnet. Being a creative writing major, I’m a big fan of poetry. I can’t always understand it as much as I’d like to think I can, but it’s cool for me to be able to see the progression of poetic structure and how the meanings of a poem are very much affected by its structure.